


A Strange Encounter

by smolranger



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-14
Updated: 2019-03-14
Packaged: 2019-11-17 20:38:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18106046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smolranger/pseuds/smolranger
Summary: When Mollymauk falls in the battlefield, the Raven Queen comes to collect. For some reason this tiefling strikes Vax as oddly familiar....





	A Strange Encounter

Mollymauk felt pain, then warmth, then nothing at all. His back had fallen hard onto the dirt below, but the surface under him dissolved, the pebbles digging into his hands vanished, and he was left floating on air and light. But his eyes never closed. Above him, his friends still fought, their silhouettes strange: blurry, moving excruciatingly slowly and disjointedly, like puppets.

Some time passed. Not a lot, since nobody above him had made very much progress in moving. Then he heard footsteps. They were feather light, but he could hear them perfectly clearly, since they were the only sound he could hear. The only sound left, perhaps. The steps got closer, then stopped. A dark figure peered over him, but unlike the others, he was crisp and clear and audible. The figure reached out and touched Mollymauk’s cheek, and Molly could feel him.

“Hello, friend. Bit of a rough day, hm?” His voice was low and caramelly, and he spoke with a rich Tal’doreian accent. Molly found he wasn’t currently able to make sounds with his mouth.  
“Let’s get you up. This is the hardest part.” The figure took his hands and lifted him. The floating feeling intensified, like one last line of a ship was cut. Now he was really drifting, no feeling anywhere but on the point where the man’s hands touched his. Molly studied his face. His dark hair was braided back and he had high, delicate cheekbones. And he was smiling.

“Takes a moment to get used to. We’ll just wait here.”

Molly found that the floating sensation did not cease, but it seemed more natural. He could control where he moved again. He looked around and saw the same slow fuzziness that had been right above him all over. Except for the crystal clear figure in front of him. “Thank you,” he told the man. “For helping me up.”

“Of course. Let’s go.” Still holding one of his hands, he guided Molly towards a dark oval that looked very far away and seemed to be growing larger.  
Molly looked down as they walked and saw his body was still there, on the ground, now growing fuzzy. Oh. Oh. “Wait. My things…my friends,” he pulled against the man’s hands. “Wait, please.”

They stopped. “I need,” he gestured to his…to himself. “I can’t leave my things or,” he glanced at the blurry figures, “or my friends.”  
The man put a hand on his cheek, gently turning him away from the body. “You must, my friend. There is nothing you can help them with anymore.”

Beau was falling to her knees in slow motion next to him. Falling and falling and falling. He reached out but he couldn’t move that far, couldn’t touch her, couldn’t comfort her. The man stretched out his shoulders and a black curtain of feathers fell out of them - wings - wrapping around him like a blanket and blocking his view of Beau. “You don’t want to watch the goodbyes, friend,” he said quietly. “It will only make you very, very sad.”

Molly let himself be folded into the wings. He walked with the man toward the dark oval. He tried to look back before he crossed over into the inky void, but he couldn’t see past the feathers. The oval swelled around them and then they were standing on a bridge, no, a net. A golden net that stretched around them in every direction. Molly looked down and saw that his feet were floating just above the threads, which was good, since they looked precarious to cross, and the void below them was equally empty as the one above. “Are you the Raven Queen?” He asked.

The man laughed. The sound seemed strangely out of place here, though so did the man. He seemed so solid, so full of life, unlike how Molly felt. “Oh no, thankfully not. I am her…messenger. Her servant. Or her champion, if I’m feeling particularly full of myself.”

“I didn’t follow the Raven Queen,” Molly replied. It wasn’t quite a question.

“She has a role in everyone’s death, whether they ask her to or not. Our role is brief though.” He gestured to another oval, silver, at the other end of the impossibly long space. “Just a way point. Bahamut, yes? I knew a Paladin of Bahamut once. He waits for you.”  
Molly gaped at the space around him, the impossibly long net. “Bahamut. And to think I only half believed in any of it. You have a strange job,” he noted. “Soul-guiding. Doesn’t sound like it would pay well.”

The man laughed again. He laughed a lot, considering the circumstances. “You sound like my brother-in-law.”

“What sort of demigod has a brother in law?” Molly asked.

“The kind that was good at making deals when he was still alive. Or maybe very bad.” the man said. “I was alive not too long ago, I think. What year was it? Can you still remember? Those kinds of details fade quickly.”

“Eight-hundred and thirty-five,” Molly said. “It was Fessuran, I believe.”

“It wasn’t too long ago, then,” he said. “Or maybe it was. It’s easy to lose track when you have forever and forever. Time doesn’t quite move in a straight line for me anymore.”

They moved forward a bit more in silence. Then the man stopped. “Ah, wait, it’s right here.” He reached out an impossibly long distance and gently pulled a thread from the net towards him. It was gold, like all the others, but as he saw it more closely, Molly realized it had a faint iridescence to it, a subtle rainbow. And it was bright, so bright that Molly had a hard time looking at it straight on. “I like to show people, when I get the chance.”

Molly stared at it. “Is that…?”

“Your lifeline, Mollymauk Tealeaf. Your thread. I can see it all when I hold it. You lived a short life, but it was very bright. Full of colors, full of people, full of good deeds. People will hold you in their hearts long after you leave this space.”

“It’s so short…is it just me? Not any of the others, not Lucien?”

The man shook his head. “I couldn’t ferry the same soul over twice. You are the only Mollymauk, whoever might have shared the same form before you was not the same.”  
Relief like Molly had never know flooded his chest, his whole body. “So I was right.”

“You were right.” He let the thread go and they walked again.

“You know my name, but I don’t know yours,” Molly said. “Do you have one that you could share?”

He looked up towards the void, not as if he was trying to remember the name, but more like he was savoring the memory of it. Only then did Molly notice the distinctly half-elven shape of his ears. “Vax’ildan.”

“Vax’ildan,” he repeated. “That’s nice.” They had reached the silver oval, after an impossibly long time. “Is this where your job ends?”

“It is,” he said. “You move on and I stay here. I’ll remember you though. I can tell your friends where to find you, when they make their way through. But now, you go on in peace. It is time to rest.”

“I don’t feel ready to rest, yet.” Molly said. “But I suppose there’s no choice.”

“No,” Vax’ildan said. “Not really. But at least there will be no more pain.” His face was almost ageless, but in that moment, he seemed ancient.  
Molly smiled. “Thank you, then, Vax’ildan, for your guidance.”

“Thank you, Molly, for the glimpse into your life.”

He released Molly’s hands, and pushed the wings ever so slightly forward. Molly’s airy form moved toward the oval as if on a breeze, overwhelmed with silver light.  
Vax stared at the oval for a few moments, lost in thought. “He really did remind me a bit of Percy,” he muttered. And then he took off on his wings, on to the next soul, the next day, the next eternity. “Goodbye, Mollymauk.”


End file.
